Uninvited
by Walking Happy Meal
Summary: Spike. A doorstep. Alanis Morissette. Angst. First of the 'Aftermath' series.


Aftermath...because survivor guilt can be a bitch   
Uninvited   
By The Walking Happy Meal  
_NB - This story contains huge spoilers for the Season Five finale. If you haven't seen _The Gift_ you probably shouldn't read it._   
  
  
The smoke curls into the air and disappears. I'm too distracted to pay much mind to the music blaring from the bedroom window above me, but fragments of it keep registering and triggering my own memories.   
  
**"Between violence and silently seething."   
  
** _I get this spell reversed, they'll be finding your body for weeks.   
Make a move. Please. I'm dying for good slay. _   
  
**"Between my fist and my Pollyanna flower."   
  
** _Let me clear this up for you. We're mortal enemies. We don't get "time-outs." _   
  
**"Between fuck you to your face and it's alright."   
  
** _What's wrong?   
I don't want to talk about it.   
Is there something I can do? _   
  
**"Between war and denial"   
  
** _The robot is gone. The robot was gross and obscene.  
It wasn't supposed to be -  
Don't. That thing... it's not even real. What you did for me, and Dawn, that was real. And I'll never forget it. _   
  
Alanis Morissette. Bloody hell.   
  
"Dawn love, can you play a different song?"   
  
**"Like any uncharted territory, I must seem greatly intriguing."   
  
** _Death is on your heels baby - and sooner or later, it's going to catch you... And some part of you wants it. Not only to stop the fear and the uncertainty - but because you're just a little bit in love with it. _   
  
**"You speak of my love like you had experienced love like mine before"   
  
** _You'll be in love till it kills you both. You'll fight, you'll shag, you'll hate each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. Real love isn't brains, children, it's blood, it's blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it. _  
  
**"But this is not allowed."   
  
** _Whatever you think you're feeling...it's not love. You can't love without a soul. _   
  
**"You're uninvited."   
  
** _You can't just shut me out. _   
  
**"An unfortunate sight."   
  
** _You're beneath me._   
  
"Come on Little Bit. No more Alanis. Play something else, eh?"   
  
The track plays for a moment longer and is finally replaced by one of those twit boy bands. I never thought I'd be glad to be listening to the Backstreet Boys, but even my twisted mind can't come up with depressing memories based on "everybody rock your body".   
  
Plenty of unrelated ones, but none based on that.   
  
I don't blame her for the blarey music. It drowns out the sound of her crying and tears are something you should shed privately.   
  
Mine have been at any rate.   
  
Truth be told she doesn't need me. Glory's minions didn't strike me as the 'loyalty beyond death' types. Still I promised to protect her, so that's what I'm doing here. Protecting her. Just in case.   
  
I'm certainly not sitting on her doorstep chain smoking because my own place is too fucking lonely.   
  
I'm protecting Dawn.   
  
I am.   
  
I'm also looking at the doorframe and thinking.   
  
Okay brooding.   
  
It's not like Angel took out a patent or anything.   
  
I'm looking at the doorframe and thinking about the barriers. Buffy had to have known about them since she was little. A slayer's supposed to know these things, right?   
  
She can't have known much about what the barriers are like though. It's understandable. You can only find these things out if you're a vampire and it's not the sort of thing I could comfortably talk to her about and I doubt Angel ever could either.   
  
Now, the barrier to your typical family home feels like plexiglass. It's see-through, it's smooth and if you try to walk through it, you'll whack your nose. If the family happen to go and travel the world for a few years though, the barrier goes funny. It softens a bit, then a lot. It's to do with the people, not the house itself.   
  
Her dorm room barrier would have been fairly mushy even if Willow hadn't told me to come in. Student accommodation barriers feel like jelly. Nobody really feels like their room is 'home', so the barriers lose their power. By the same token, you can be living homeless on the streets, but as long as you have a possessive 'finders keepers' attitude when it comes to cardboard boxes, you're safe from vampires.   
  
Contrary to popular belief, hospitals and schools do have barriers, but they're barely a mist. A quick cold feeling as you walk in and nothing else. On the other hand, when you do something incredibly stupid in a fit of temper that makes somebody revoke your invitation to their house, like chaining them to a ceiling for instance, the barrier _burns_.   
  
When she first took back my invitation, the barrier burnt. It didn't scar me or leave any marks, but I might as well have been pressing my face into a brazier... or a crucifix. The door was hot with how uninvited I was. That's pretty much when I gave up. The moment I felt the heat of that barrier.   
  
I didn't give up on her of course. If everybody were allowed to pick and choose who they fell in love with, the world would be a much simpler place, but we can't so I didn't. I just gave up trying to win her over. Subtlety hadn't worked, neither had grand gestures. She was never going to love me in return and since the reasons for that were out of my sphere of influence, I was going to have to live with it.   
  
Or unlive with it... whatever.   
  
At this point, I'm used to being rejected because I'm not Angel. Well, not used to, that makes it sound like I'm comfortable with it. Hardened to maybe? I don't know. That's not the main reason anyway. She managed to shag Captain Cardboard while she was pining for El Soulio and when he buggered off to spend the better part of a century brooding, Dru was able to settle for me, so it's not like I'm repulsive.   
  
Well, maybe at the moment, but those are battle scars. They don't count.   
  
The trouble is that repulsive isn't the only thing I'm not. In fact it's part of a list of the many things I'm not. A list that starts with 'I'm not Angel', ends with 'I'm not a tall non-smoker with a yen for picnics in the park' and somewhere along the way mentions that, oh yeah, I'm not human either.   
  
Like any of that's my fault?   
  
Well, maybe the smoking bit.   
  
The vampire thing though, now that I didn't have much choice in. I didn't go out that night asking to be made immortal. I got bit that's all.   
  
Cecily Addams, the reason I was wandering around at night alone in the first place, is relegated with Harmony to the box at the back of my mind marked 'Don't go there'.   
  
I got bit and then I got chipped. Thing is, I don't think Buffy ever quite understood the chip. None of them did. Not even the commando. Not even me.   
  
Not at first.   
  
I can't remember much of the experiments. Being drugged out of your mind does funny things to your memory. What I can remember is painful and largely stuck in the 'Don't go there' box along with Cecily and Harmony. I escaped though. They never expected me to. They figured I'd be in the cell long enough for the chip to activate. See that's the thing.   
  
It didn't activate right away.   
  
I thought at first it just took a while to warm up, but that's not it. It wasn't just a 'bite and get zapped' deal. It was a carefully thought out program to remove my killer instinct entirely. First it hurt to try and bite, then to hit people, then it got so I was being migrainated if I so much as shoved somebody. As soon as I'd got one thing down the chip would start going off for a more minor infraction. Once I'd worked this out I started worrying that eventually theft would trigger it and I'd have to get a job.   
  
Gainful employment. Now there's a scary thought.   
  
Another, scarier thought is currently drifting from my 'Don't go there' box about how I was Hostile 17, but I was the only chipped vampire in that entire lab. It turns out that Hostiles 1 through 16 had a spot of trouble adjusting and killed themselves before I was even captured. I have an incredibly vague memory of a couple of the Initiative white-coats discussing it, but it's not the sort of thing you should dwell on. Suicide is easy for a vampire. Unless you're trapping in a cell without sunlight, stakes or holy water, then it's a difficult, slow and incredibly painful affair involving self-mutilation.   
  
Yep. Best not to dwell on it.   
  
Especially when it was almost me.   
  
At the end of the day however I managed to become 'the one that got away'. I ran and once I was out of captivity, I managed to adjust to the chip... mostly. What the Initiative brainiacs hadn't counted on was the sheer amount of demons running around Sunnydale. Demons I could kill. Demons I could take it out on. So I got past the suicidal feelings and went on to phase two of my own personal twelve-step program.   
  
I'd already stopped killing. Next I stopped wanting to.   
  
Well, not completely, but...   
  
I'm not sure how much of it was the chip and how much was her. It just seemed like one day I was having trouble convincing people that I was still the big bad, then the next I was having trouble convincing myself.   
  
Can you create a soul from scratch?   
  
I'm different from Angel. I know that. I don't spend my waking hours brooding over all the people I killed. I don't feel hugely guilty about them and that's probably for the best. I make seriously crappy company when I'm depressed.   
  
Like now for instance.   
  
Still I've got no desire to bring back my bad old days and I suspect that even if they were to remove the chip, the urge would still be gone. I used to fantasise about it. Keep on fighting side by side, earn her respect and then one day just reveal to her that the chip had been gone all along and then maybe she'd see that I was better than him.   
  
He fights because he wants to balance some big moral ledger. If he doesn't atone for all his sins as Angelus he might end up back in Hell. If he doesn't do the right thing his soul nags at him. I fight because I choose to. I'm not being forced into it. I gave up on the idea of Heaven for myself a long time ago. Saving the world's just a hobby.   
  
Fucking dangerous hobby.   
  
Yesterday I was afraid to touch the doorway in case it was still as hot as the night Dru came back. I was so afraid of being burned again.   
  
So hot. Burning with emotion and righteous indignation and life and _her_.   
  
I stretch out my fingers in spite of myself and for a moment I'm desperate to feel that heat again. To burn my hands on that tangible proof of her existence.   
  
But there's nothing.   
  
No fire, no plexiglass, no jelly, not even a mist.   
  
It's just a doorway.   
  
  
[Read the rest of Aftermath series][1]   
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   [1]: http://www.geocities.com/walkinghappymeal/aftermath/
   [2]: mailto:walkinghappymeal@rinkworks.com



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